Humanity’s power over itself
On Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas and the irreplaceable fact of being human
On May 25, the leader of 1.4 billion Catholics released an 82-page document on artificial intelligence. It was the first encyclical of his papacy, the most authoritative form of papal teaching, and he chose to open it not with scripture, but with a line that should unsettle anyone paying attention: Never has humanity had such power over itself.
The document is called Magnifica Humanitas, Magnificent Humanity. Whether you are Catholic, secular, a teacher, a parent, a technologist, or a journalist watching the world reorder itself in real time, it deserves our attention. Not because of its theological framework, but because what it says is the most deeply inconvenient thing anyone could say at this moment in our history, and it is inconvenient for almost everyone.
The encyclical covers 245 numbered paragraphs across five chapters. Its central argument can be stated simply: AI is not evil, but it is not neutral, and we are failing to govern it with anything close to the wisdom it demands.
The most precise line in the document is this one: Technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.
That sentence cuts in every direction at once. It makes the AI companies accountable. It makes governments accountable. It makes the rest of us accountable too.
Pope Leo’s prescription is equally unambiguous. Artificial intelligence, he wrote, needs to be “disarmed.” He acknowledged the word was strong. He said it was chosen deliberately, because the moment requires language that awakens rather than soothes.
Several of his positions pushed well beyond what most secular institutions have been willing to say.
On autonomous weapons, he drew a hard line: decisions involving lethal force must never be delegated to machines. Moral judgment requires conscience and personal responsibility that algorithms cannot possess. And then, the line that drew the most gasps, he declared that traditional just-war theory is “now outdated.” The framework that has governed Western ethics on warfare for centuries, he argued, was not designed for a world in which machine systems can lower the threshold for violence without a human ever pulling a trigger. An idea straight out of the mouth of Hannad Arendt.
On power and data, he named the structural problem directly. Data is a common good, he wrote. Algorithms and digital platforms should serve all people. The growing concentration of AI capability in the hands of a small number of corporations risks creating new forms of inequality that is economic, political, and epistemic. The ability to know, to be seen, to participate: these are being distributed unequally, and the encyclical says so bluntly.
He also addressed the colonial dimension of AI infrastructure, rare in any major institutional document, pointing to the extractive mining industries in the Global South that supply the minerals required for data centers and AI hardware. The benefits of AI accrue to the wealthy. The costs are borne by those who never consented to them.
The document includes a formal apology from the Catholic Church for its historical role in tolerating slavery. Unusual? Yes. But the spine of the encyclical is a call for human dignity across its full arc. You cannot argue for that principle while remaining silent on the moments the Church itself violated it.
The frame holding all of this together is a binary: humanity can either construct Babel, a tower of accumulated technological power that collapses into confusion and hierarchy, or rebuild Jerusalem, a community oriented toward shared humanity. It is not a metaphor about religion. It is a metaphor about who holds power, and for whom.
Beyond the geopolitical arguments, beyond the condemnation of autonomous weapons and deepfakes in politics, beyond the structural critique of Silicon Valley concentration — there is a philosophical claim at the center of Magnifica Humanitas that is subtler, and possibly more important.
Pope Leo identifies what he calls the deepest danger of our current moment. It is not job loss. It is not surveillance. It is not even autonomous weapons.
It is the possibility that human beings will begin to see themselves, and each other, as projects to be optimized.
Against this, the encyclical makes a striking argument. Human limits like illness, aging, suffering, vulnerability, failure, are not defects to be engineered away. They are, in many cases, the very conditions in which human beings discover wisdom, experience genuine closeness with others, and become most fully themselves. What makes us human is not our processing speed. It is not our memory capacity, our pattern recognition, or our ability to produce fluent text.
It is something more like what we carry: the lessons etched like scars, the memory of the journey between freedom and falls, between dreams and disappointments.
This is what no algorithm can translate into a digital experience.
An AI system can simulate empathy, and do so convincingly. It can produce language that sounds like grief, like longing, like hope. But it has never received a scary diagnosis. It has not held someone’s hand at the end of a long life. It has not made the wrong choice and lived inside the consequence for years. It has not changed itself because it felt shameful.
The capacity to grow, as distinct from the capacity to be updated, is something that happens only under the pressure of actual experience, of having something real at stake, of knowing that time moves in one direction, and that it is finite.
This is not a religious claim. It is an anthropological one. And it is the most important question the current moment is forcing us to answer: not what AI can do, but what it cannot.
The encyclical’s answer is unambiguous. It cannot replicate the weight of a human life.
Magnifica Humanitas was signed on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s landmark encyclical on labor in the industrial age. The parallel was deliberate. The original Leo wrote into a world reshaped by machinery, by displacement, by the concentration of capital in few hands. This Leo is writing at that same inflection point. The question isn’t what we lose when AI replicates us. It’s what we lose when it can’t, but we accept the imitation anyway.
The full text of Magnifica Humanitas is available for free at the Vatican website.